“Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.” SpiritualityFictionTeachingAttachment Book:The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd Source: The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
“One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves. I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford.... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary.” ScienceSpiritualityLiteratureTeachingLiberal Arts Book:The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd Source: The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
“Teaching English is an intrinsically radical act. Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?” PeopleTeachTeachingKillingRadicalKilling Each OtherTeaching English Author:Mary Rose O'Reilley